On March 8, 2023, a 27-year-old Grand Marias vigilante, Levi Axtell, covered in his victim’s blood and gore, drove to the sheriff’s office, and with his hand on his head, he said he had just killed Lawrence Scully, 77, in Mr. Scully’s home. Mr. Scully’s body bore defensive injuries, as the Associated Press reports.

The old man reportedly fought back against a killer almost a third of his age.

Good for him.

The weapons were a shovel – wielded up to twenty times against the victim’s head according to Axtell — and a rack of moose horns, items found in the victim’s home. Axtell was arrested and charged with second-degree murder.

Axtell’s reason for his action is that he believed Scully intended to sexually molest his – Axtell’s – young daughter and her daycare peers and believed Scully had been stalking her.

Apparently, Axtell had held this belief for some time, having made a complaint in 2018 and asking for an order of protection against Scully. It was granted but removed after several weeks because law enforcement investigations found no evidence to support the claim.

Scully’s status as a registered sex offender was certainly known in the tiny town. He ran for mayor in 2014, and media stories then discussed his crime and conviction. It is unclear whether he was ever displayed on Minnesota’s public registry. A search of the database did not return his record nor, incidentally, any current registrant at all in Cook County, Minnesota.

One bizarre twist to this already bizarre story are the postings of a woman named Melissa Axtell, identified as the “believed-to-be” sister of Levi. She expresses gratitude to the people of Grand Marias for their “outpouring” of love and support for Levi upon his becoming a murderer. She is also sponsoring a fundraising page, a page whereon at least one donor used the comment function of the page to call Axtell “a hero.”

The inappropriateness of calling the vicious killer of a defenseless, elderly man a “hero” for committing a violent criminal act pushes the limits of “bizarre” to a new level. One of the media outlets writing about this, while not going as far as the fundraising page comment, includes a quote from a former FBI agent that implies a jury might share this view of Axtell.

“Former FBI agent Jennifer Coffindaffer believes that the jury will be ‘very sympathetic’ to Axtell. ‘I am not excusing his actions. . . But typically, a person who commits a crime like this, for these reasons, is received [sic] a lighter sentence’ Coffindaffer said . . .” Additionally, a YouTube video that calls Axtell a hero has received well over nine thousand views.

This is, of course, not an unexpected twist nor a particularly original one. Several years ago blogger Shelly Stow and member of Reform Sex Offender Laws, Inc, (now NARSOL) pointed out that those with sexual offense convictions and in general population in prison have a high expectation of being beaten or murdered, and that expectation is shared by staff and administration. National media carried reports of praise and acclaims of heroism for an Alaskan man who used the registry to hunt down and violently attack registered sexual offenders with a hammer.

James Fairbanks was hailed as a hero in some reports for the coldblooded murder of a formerly convicted sexual offender. And these are all, except for YouTube, mainstream media.

YouTube and other social media platforms are rife with praise and accolades for those who “protect children” by killing “sex offenders.”

The subtext is clear: Those who are on a sexual offender registry – regardless of the offense – or who have a sexual offense conviction are worth less than everyone else; they deserve to be attacked, maimed, or killed; they should be killed; killing someone like that is a noble act, an act of bravery.

This is what the sex offender registry says about every man, woman, and child listed on it.

Would Lawrence Scully have molested a child? We don’t know. We will never know. But among the things we do know are these:

We do not, in this country, take the law into our own hands, in vigilante fashion, and kill someone.

We do not, in this country, kill someone for something we believe they might do, something for which they have not been arrested, let alone convicted.

We do not, in this country, bludgeon and massacre someone to death with shovels and moose horns.

And when we do, it is, literally, murder; it is an unconscionable criminal act. It is not the act of a hero. Heroes die on battlefields saving their comrades in arms. They rush into burning buildings to rescue children. They sacrifice their own lives to stop others from being killed. They spend years of their lives caring for the aged, the maimed and the vulnerable.

They do not wantonly, cruelly, or viciously commit murder.

Levi Axtell is currently in Cook County jail and is scheduled to appear in court on April 10.

SOURCE: thecrimereport.org

Sandy Rozek is a contributor for The Crime Report’s Viewpoints series and the communications director for the National Assc. for Rational Sexual Offense Laws — NARSOL — an organization that advocates for laws based on facts and evidence and for policies that support the successful rehabilitation, restoration, and reintegration of law-abiding, registered persons into society as the path to a safer society. We are a national organization with an interest in both federal, state, and local issues, policies, and legislation related to our interests. Her articles have appeared in a variety of publications.

When before, when else today is it not only okay but standard operating procedure to subject a group as a whole to obloquy? Add to that these commentators have for the most part an absolutely indestructible ignorance, one with a focused frame of reference which includes a few outlier cases, the Kankas, the Wetterlings. The news stories that made the most sensational news, that everyone agreed with one another, ‘those sickos need to die.’

Yet most of us on the registry are not outliers, we did not “sexually abuse” but had a case of an age difference the law does not allow; we were not “child molesters” but a 9 year old and an 8 year old playing doctor; we did not display “publicly lewd and lascivious behavior” but needed to urinate by the side of a road for a lack of a restroom; we did not “kidnap” but held someone up who had been hit by a car, then lecture this young person on the dangers of playing so close to the road.

I had my jaw broken in prison because someone heard “sex offender” and spread the word. The attack came by surprise, though I had expected it for months. The prison awarded the inmates who attacked me with new housing and fresh pillows, and a few words of encouragement. Both got to keep their parole dates. I got shipped out to ad-seg for 90 days for being “out of place” on my own housing unit.

It would be satisfying to see courtrooms become places in which compassion and an attempt to understand the motives behind an act and the result from potentially years in prison were considered. Today we have arrived at a point at which fast-tracked legislation includes strict liability laws no room for interpretation of mens rea. The powers of judiciary and legislative over-lap, perhaps, when judges have no ability to think about how to implement a law, and when prosecutors are playing a game to see who can snuff the greatest number of bad guys, and the cops are charging folks with crimes with the same sort of prejudice we can all see, smell and hear all over the net and the television. People are simply doing what they believe other people want them to do, and what they have to do in the face of so many ‘sick and deranged pedophiles’ running around abducting children.

What is terrifying, really and truly, is the way in which those sex offenders enduring the stigma of Megan’s Law are being scape-goated for behavior not only have they not committed, but which they might possibly commit in the future and might have done in their past. In the news of might have done, a distraught father discussed the shooting of his son by person(s) unknown, then links the murder to the likelihood of it being a sex offender. Just because. As for might have done, when are we going to get it across to folks that not everyone’s past is as sinful as the papers would have them believe? Since news is largely entertainment, and since feelings of disgust and hatred are extremely easy to conjure up,  news stories give people that nice mix of hatred to stew upon, and they come back for more.

To be fair, it is not always a simple matter to discern fact from opinion – in fact, the two are marvelously interwoven; now eggs are good, now not so much. This guy is a father of two, now he is a horrific monster who took family photographs, one of which was of his kids bathing.

The fact is that facts are laid out in a manner to convince us that we ought be of another mind, and opposition is created. Instead of rightly seeing how we can agree, contrarianism reigns, for peace is difficult and war easy. Let us not call opinion fiction. Maybe the point is none of us knows.

Sometimes a good feeling arises from feeling the enemy has been beaten down. But what of when we are the enemy? Reading a recent YouTube comment about a “sexual predator” nearing his mandatory release from prison, the author saw a gushing wave of criticism, hate and filth directed at the man in question, but more generally, a group with which he has been largely associated.

No matter your feelings on his crime, whether you sympathize after having been bum-rushed yourself by an aggressive police-force, or sustain a lively hatred for those people charged with lewd behavior around a child, a general question arises, and we need not an answer, but questions, plural.
a) Do we have a way to forgive when we do not understand?
b) Need we understand in order to forgive,
c) and lastly, do we need to forgive in order to live and let another (wo)man live?

So for instance, this video seemed to bring out some unfavorable commentary from a keyboard vigilante, and to which recently the author responded to as a newly established vigilant citizen. Read, digest, then come up with some citations you might include. People actually open up to education, even the ones who talk about killing and pedophiles needed the gas chamber.

You will please note the desire of ‘Martell Tha Cool’ in the link above to present himself as a gun-wielding-child-savior-man-of-invincible-ignorance, an ignorance protected by the mob mentality which we have allowed and continue to allow by responding with feelings we pretend are facts. I’ll give him credit, there are a lot of things I do not understand, and yet I have never felt my uninformed, decisive conclusions about entire groups worthy of posting to the world at large. But, lucky us, Martell Tha Cool feels just such gumption, expressing his desire to put some lead in the heads of some, well, you know, the much derided sex offenders.

So what do we do? Well, let’s scroll to the bottom where the denizens deride registered citizens, conflating crimes and amalgamating titles so that a sexual offender is now a non-entity, a creature whose value to others need not be considered, who has signed away all rights, whose family can be castigated with no remorse, who deserves no second look.

Please, if you have time, if you want to help, go out and educate those who look to have the harshest opinions not backed by fact.

Offer the misinformed a second look, a calm perspective shift, because what they do not know can hurt us.